The Epoch of Technical Media
This chapter discusses the development of media and communication, the reasons for these developments, and ultimately the co-dependent relationship that has developed between humanity and the machines we build to help us do our work. Hayles uses the theories of Freidrich A. Kittler to layout the groundwork for how and why media and communications have developed in the ways that they have. Hayles dubs the last couple hundred years the Epoch of Technical Media.
What she means by this is that prior to the nineteenth century, media and communication was all text driven: manuscripts, books, newspapers, letters, etc. In 1800, though, Heinrich Stephanie developed the phonetic method of reading, which began to get people to begin to consider the possibilities of orality and audio being part of mass communication. By 1900, media had developed along three technological lines: acoustical, optical, and textual. In order to come to grips with why media began to develop at the pace it did beginning in the nineteenth century, Kittler posits that ultimately, "war performs as the driving force for media transformation" (92). In particular, Kittler lays out three significant periods of media development and notes that they all came during periods of significant military conflict:
American Civil War - we developed storage methods three technologies: gramophone (acoustic), film (optic), and typewriter (textual)
World War I - we developed appropriate transmission methods for each technology: radio (acoustic), television (optic), and "secret counterparts" (textual) such as radio transmission of morse code to quickly pass messages along the various fronts
World War II - we transferred schematic of typewriter to a technology of predictability, Alan Turing's mathematical definition of computability in 1936 led to computers
What Drives War?
With the understanding of where media came from, a big question for Hayles is "what drives war?" (92). She then examines practices in the global economic sector, which heavily relies on media in order to move on markets as quickly as possible, and explains how banks and companies playing the stock market routinely engage in tactics similar to those seen on the battlefield in order to succeed. She ultimately comes to the conclusion that "[t]he goal is not to maintain one's position or to survive but to win...[t]raders see themselves as engaged in combat, if not outright war, with rival banks and other traders" (100). In other words, companies are not out to just make money, but rather see their main goal as the elimination of competing companies. Making money is just a part of that, and they use media to its fullest in order keep ahead of their competitors. In some ways, media drives their war, rather than the other way around.
Embodiment
With the development of media placed in a historical context, Hayles then goes on to examine the relationship between—as the subtitle suggests—“the body and the machine.” One area of interest is the notion of embodiment: is machine supplanting man as the dominant force behind meaning and development, or is man--despite all of the technological advancements--maintaining his position as the dominant species in the modern world?
Mark B. N. Hansen makes the argument that man must maintain a position of authority; he "points out that although machines might continue to function if all humans were spontaneously to disappear, 'this function would be entirely without meaning.'" (103). Basically, without man, machines have no reason for the jobs they do. For Hansen, "Man must not be relegated to the junk pile, to the pathetic status of a dependent variable with an uncertain prognosis" (103). Hansen disagrees with Kittler's suggestion that in this media epoch, the definition of 'man' is shaped by the technology surrounding him, instead suggesting that it is the reverse that is true.
Hales takes a different approach by suggesting that "the perceived 'threat' here is not a threat at all; the point is not that machines can see better, faster, and farther than can humans, but rather that human vision, whether enhanced by machines or not, remains for most people an essential faculty whereby we place ourselves in the world and interact creatively with it. Embodiment will not become obsolete because it is essential to human being, but it can and does transform in relation to environmental selective pressures, particularly through interactions with technology" (104). She goes on to argue that "[g]iven the importance of technologies to human evolution, we could (perversely) turn Hansen's argument inside out and argue that human embodiment is encapsulated within the horizon established by technological development and evolution, which would expand Kittler's media theory to grandiose proportions by including all technologies as determinants of human embodiment, from stone axes to computers. Instead of subordinating the body to technology or technology to the body, however, surely the better course is to focus on their interactions and coevolutionary dynamics" (113). In other words, where Kittler suggests that man is defined by his technology and Hansen suggests the opposite, Hayles posits the idea that both sides are so intertwined at this point that it would be impossible to define one without the other. Both man and machine are two sides of the same coin, meaning that both sides are embodied. With this in mind, she thinks that rather than try to examine the influence one has had on the other, it is more important to study how both sides have developed in symbiosis with one another.
Technology and the Human Brain
Hayles cites evidence that the proliferation of new technologies actually changes the biology of the human brain. Because of neural plasticity, the brain is capable of incorporating the information it absorbs and adapting (perhaps evolving) to condition itself to the environment of the new technology. She cites the work of anthropologist Stanley H. Ambrose in suggesting, “Evidence indicates the compound tools were contemporaneous with the accelerated development…in the frontal cortex, a part of the brain involved in language use” (113). She goes on to say, “Children growing up in media-rich environments literally have brains wired differently than humans who did not come to maturity in such conditions” (114) and that, “the 8-to 18-year-old cohort…is undergoing a significant cognitive shift” (117). What this seems to indicate is that there is a larger perspective in our need to comprehend evolving digital and computational technologies; rather than a preoccupation with the destruction of print culture, we should begin to understand how future generations’ brains will be organically different from ours, as an evolutionary necessity in a world of developing technology.
Later, on page 117, Hayles discusses how these new brains (my emphasis) are more programmed for rapid stimuli than for the “deep attention” that traditionally goes into Humanities Studies. Think here about how long we spend on deciphering a poem; even in this class, we must spend time to comprehend and appreciate the digital text. As a number of the theorists we are reading suggest, a poem has “deeper” considerations we need to encounter to explore. Nabokov said (and I paraphrase) that a novel is never read until it is read twice.
Discussion Questions:
Historically, war has provided the impetus for the development of new technologies, and this is no less true in the field of communication. However, with the proliferation of the World Wide Web over the last twenty years, we have seen an explosion of forms of communication, particularly in the realm of social media. Can we still consider wartime technology research to be the driving force behind new forms of communication, or is it the nature of the computer age beast to keep going and develop on its own?
As a follow-up, Hayles, makes the argument that media helps drive competition in the economic sector. Can we extrapolate on that and make the case that the binary has in some ways been flipped and that now media helps drive wars?
How will these “new brains” (i.e. ones more situated to comprehend rapid stimuli) force the Humanities to adapt from its “close reading” orientation to one that better represents tomorrow’s technological advancements? Follow up: what do you suppose will be lost in literary art as the generations of “old brains” (i.e. us) die out?
Mark Thomas
Hayles - Chapter 3 - CAP
The Epoch of Technical Media
This chapter discusses the development of media and communication, the reasons for these developments, and ultimately the co-dependent relationship that has developed between humanity and the machines we build to help us do our work. Hayles uses the theories of Freidrich A. Kittler to layout the groundwork for how and why media and communications have developed in the ways that they have. Hayles dubs the last couple hundred years the Epoch of Technical Media.
What she means by this is that prior to the nineteenth century, media and communication was all text driven: manuscripts, books, newspapers, letters, etc. In 1800, though, Heinrich Stephanie developed the phonetic method of reading, which began to get people to begin to consider the possibilities of orality and audio being part of mass communication. By 1900, media had developed along three technological lines: acoustical, optical, and textual. In order to come to grips with why media began to develop at the pace it did beginning in the nineteenth century, Kittler posits that ultimately, "war performs as the driving force for media transformation" (92). In particular, Kittler lays out three significant periods of media development and notes that they all came during periods of significant military conflict:
What Drives War?
With the understanding of where media came from, a big question for Hayles is "what drives war?" (92). She then examines practices in the global economic sector, which heavily relies on media in order to move on markets as quickly as possible, and explains how banks and companies playing the stock market routinely engage in tactics similar to those seen on the battlefield in order to succeed. She ultimately comes to the conclusion that "[t]he goal is not to maintain one's position or to survive but to win...[t]raders see themselves as engaged in combat, if not outright war, with rival banks and other traders" (100). In other words, companies are not out to just make money, but rather see their main goal as the elimination of competing companies. Making money is just a part of that, and they use media to its fullest in order keep ahead of their competitors. In some ways, media drives their war, rather than the other way around.
Embodiment
With the development of media placed in a historical context, Hayles then goes on to examine the relationship between—as the subtitle suggests—“the body and the machine.” One area of interest is the notion of embodiment: is machine supplanting man as the dominant force behind meaning and development, or is man--despite all of the technological advancements--maintaining his position as the dominant species in the modern world?
Mark B. N. Hansen makes the argument that man must maintain a position of authority; he "points out that although machines might continue to function if all humans were spontaneously to disappear, 'this function would be entirely without meaning.'" (103). Basically, without man, machines have no reason for the jobs they do. For Hansen, "Man must not be relegated to the junk pile, to the pathetic status of a dependent variable with an uncertain prognosis" (103). Hansen disagrees with Kittler's suggestion that in this media epoch, the definition of 'man' is shaped by the technology surrounding him, instead suggesting that it is the reverse that is true.
Hales takes a different approach by suggesting that "the perceived 'threat' here is not a threat at all; the point is not that machines can see better, faster, and farther than can humans, but rather that human vision, whether enhanced by machines or not, remains for most people an essential faculty whereby we place ourselves in the world and interact creatively with it. Embodiment will not become obsolete because it is essential to human being, but it can and does transform in relation to environmental selective pressures, particularly through interactions with technology" (104). She goes on to argue that "[g]iven the importance of technologies to human evolution, we could (perversely) turn Hansen's argument inside out and argue that human embodiment is encapsulated within the horizon established by technological development and evolution, which would expand Kittler's media theory to grandiose proportions by including all technologies as determinants of human embodiment, from stone axes to computers. Instead of subordinating the body to technology or technology to the body, however, surely the better course is to focus on their interactions and coevolutionary dynamics" (113). In other words, where Kittler suggests that man is defined by his technology and Hansen suggests the opposite, Hayles posits the idea that both sides are so intertwined at this point that it would be impossible to define one without the other. Both man and machine are two sides of the same coin, meaning that both sides are embodied. With this in mind, she thinks that rather than try to examine the influence one has had on the other, it is more important to study how both sides have developed in symbiosis with one another.
Technology and the Human Brain
Hayles cites evidence that the proliferation of new technologies actually changes the biology of the human brain. Because of neural plasticity, the brain is capable of incorporating the information it absorbs and adapting (perhaps evolving) to condition itself to the environment of the new technology. She cites the work of anthropologist Stanley H. Ambrose in suggesting, “Evidence indicates the compound tools were contemporaneous with the accelerated development…in the frontal cortex, a part of the brain involved in language use” (113). She goes on to say, “Children growing up in media-rich environments literally have brains wired differently than humans who did not come to maturity in such conditions” (114) and that, “the 8-to 18-year-old cohort…is undergoing a significant cognitive shift” (117). What this seems to indicate is that there is a larger perspective in our need to comprehend evolving digital and computational technologies; rather than a preoccupation with the destruction of print culture, we should begin to understand how future generations’ brains will be organically different from ours, as an evolutionary necessity in a world of developing technology.
Later, on page 117, Hayles discusses how these new brains (my emphasis) are more programmed for rapid stimuli than for the “deep attention” that traditionally goes into Humanities Studies. Think here about how long we spend on deciphering a poem; even in this class, we must spend time to comprehend and appreciate the digital text. As a number of the theorists we are reading suggest, a poem has “deeper” considerations we need to encounter to explore. Nabokov said (and I paraphrase) that a novel is never read until it is read twice.
Discussion Questions: